


Cosmic Dust

by PostcardsfromTheoryland



Series: Request Fics [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandonment, Gen, Keith & Krolia (Voltron) on the Space Whale, Keith (Voltron) Has Abandonment Issues, Keith and Kosmo bonding, Krolia has no idea how to be a parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28904946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PostcardsfromTheoryland/pseuds/PostcardsfromTheoryland
Summary: They're keeping the wolf. No, Keith will not change his mind about this.
Relationships: Keith & Keith's Wolf (Voltron), Keith & Krolia (Voltron)
Series: Request Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2119848
Comments: 20
Kudos: 65





	Cosmic Dust

**Author's Note:**

> I hit a kudos milestone and decided to open up requests! If you want a fic, come yell at me on [tumblr](http://postcardsfromtheoryland.tumblr.com/) (if you don't have a tumblr, you can submit an ask anonymously, or you can also just comment on this fic :))
> 
> This one is for skeeter-beetle, who asked "could you write something about Keith and kosmo? Maybe about when they first met and their bond building in the quantum abyss?" And I sort of accidentally took it angsty and I'm very sorry but there is still definitely Keith and Kosmo bonding!

“We can’t keep that thing.”

It’s the first words out of Krolia’s mouth in vargas, besides survival-based stuff like “hand me the knife so I can cut this piece of wood.” And it’s said in regard to the tiny wolf – puppy, Keith is assuming, going by the size - that’s currently curled up on the other side of the fire, watching them warily as if he knows they’re talking about him.

“Seriously? You weren’t there for 18 years and the first remotely parental thing you do is tell me I can’t have a pet?”

“It’s not logical,” Krolia says, resolutely not looking in his direction. “We don’t know how easy it will be to find food here, and we don’t need the trouble of another mouth to feed. Besides, it’s probably dangerous.”

“He’s just a baby,” Keith argues. “We can train him. Humans domesticated wolves on earth to get dogs so I don’t see why a space wolf would be any different. And he can help us hunt when he gets bigger.” A simplification of the domestication process, probably, but Keith doesn’t really care right now.

“Keith,” Krolia sighs, and it’s got that same tone that so many of his foster mothers had used, and Keith immediately bristles. But before he can do anything, Krolia grabs one of the sticks from the fire and waves it at the wolf, the flames making brief contact with his snout. The poor thing yelps and scrambles away, disappearing into the darkness outside of their cave.

“Why did you do that?” Keith yells, jumping to his feet and about to stomp out of the cave when Krolia grabs his wrist to stop him. “He’s little and all alone and you just threw him away!”

Krolia turns a shrewd eye and a raised eyebrow on him. “Is this about the wolf, or you?”

“We’re not doing this now,” Keith grinds out, trying to yank his hand out of Krolia’s grip, but she just ignores him.

“I didn’t ‘throw you away,’ and you were hardly alone just because I wasn’t there. You look human. You had an entire planet of people around you. You have your father!”

“Had,” Keith says. “Dad died. A long time ago. Not that you ever bothered to check up on us.” It’s not how he was intending to have this conversation, and a tiny part of him is regretful that he’s telling Krolia like this, when he’s angry, but she _left_.

“What?” Krolia breathes, but her grip on his wrist has gone lax, and Keith snatches his hand back and goes stalking away to find the puppy.

Krolia lets him leave.

Keith’s never actually had a pet before, unless you counted the couple times he was placed with families with dogs and cats and once, a lizard (that had been his favorite, honestly, because the dogs would growl at him and the cats would leave when he entered the room, but you couldn’t tell whether an iguana hated you or not), so he feels a little silly wandering around calling for a wolf that doesn’t have a name and probably doesn’t understand English, but it’s the only thing he can think of doing.

Why did she have to do that? The little puppy hadn’t hurt anything. He was just scared and alone. Keith doesn’t know how the wolf got here, but he doesn’t seem to have parents or a family at all, and now he’s probably going to be afraid of them, and his little puppy claws and teeth won’t make good defense against some of the angrier creatures they’ve seen so far.

Why did she leave to “protect” him, when the best protection she could have given him would have been to stay on Earth and make sure Keith wasn’t alone and that he actually understood the other half of his genetics before he got launched into an intergalactic war?

No. This isn’t about his issues with Krolia. This is about finding the wolf.

He wanders around aimlessly for a while, until he finally thinks to follow the stream. Animals know to stick close to a source of water, right? That sounds like something they would do. It’s a couple vargas later, as Keith is realizing just how long of a day it’s been since Kolivan first sent him on the mission to retrieve Krolia (and fuck, why didn’t Kolivan explain he was extracting his own _mother_?) before Keith stumbles upon a cave, much smaller than the one they’d picked out earlier, and Keith can just make out a tiny bit of blue bioluminescence shining out at him. He gets down on his hands and knees and crawls forward, holding a hand out for the wolf to sniff and hoping he’s not about to get his fingers bitten.

“Hey, little guy,” he whispers as the wolf whimpers and cowers away from him, and he feels a stab of anger at Krolia again for undoing his hard work of coaxing the wolf into their camp with a piece of the giant bug meat. “It’s ok. See, it’s just me. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

It’s a long while of Keith’s murmured assurances before there’s any change, but Keith has a feeling that time is something they’ll have a lot of in the future. Patience yields focus, after all. The wolf finally sticks his snout far enough out to nose at Keith’s hand, then sort of huffs at him and nibbles gently on his fingers.

“Yeah, I know. I was mad she did that, too. I won’t let her do it again.” The puppy looks him over before deliberately shifting to the side. Like this, there’s just enough room for both of them to curl up in the little cavern. It won’t be particularly comfortable, and they have nothing for a fire, but Keith is tired and he doesn’t have the energy to deal with Krolia anymore tonight.

Decision made, he shuffles inside, and the wolf immediately takes the open space and snuggles against his chest like a warm, slightly-too-heavy stuffed animal.

“Yeah, see? This works.” The idea of just staying here indefinitely crosses his mind, but that’s stupid. He’ll need to talk to Krolia eventually. Just…not now.

“My name is Keith,” he whispers, feeling foolish, but they’re on a space whale traveling through what is essentially a rift in time and the wolf showed up like a shooting star, so maybe he does actually understand spoken language? Stranger things have happened since this whole thing started. “I don’t know what your name is, but you can tell me when you’re ready. The mean lady is Krolia. She’s – she’s my mother, but she left when I was still little, so I don’t remember anything about her.” The wolf bunts his head against Keith’s sternum, which he takes as an invitation to keep talking. Whether the wolf does actually understand him or just likes the sound of Keith’s voice he’s not sure.

“I don’t know if you have parents. Maybe you just…showed up? Like you’re made of cosmic dust, or something? But when I was little, it was just me and my dad. He was nice. He was a fireman – that’s someone that gets rid of fires that have gone out of control. He didn’t come home, one night. His coworkers told me he was a hero, that he saved a little girl, but…what about me? Didn’t he…?

“I was all alone after that, for a long time. There were people that were supposed to take care of me, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t like a real family. If Krolia had actually been there like she was supposed to, if she’d actually been a mother, it would have been different. And she said it was to protect me but that’s _bullshit_ , you can’t protect someone if you’re not actually there to take care of them, can you?”

He doesn’t realize he’s started crying until the wolf is licking the tears off his face, and it startles him into laughing.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make that ‘Keith sulks about his childhood’ hour. It’s gonna be a long trip if I just sit here feeling sorry for myself the whole time, isn’t it?” Granted, it’s also going to be a long trip if he talks only to a wolf puppy who doesn’t seem to be able to respond and not to his Galra mother who is the only other person on the space whale they’re currently traveling on.

Ugh.

Before he can get much further down that train of thought, he’s distracted by one of the stupid time flashes, though at least this one is a flash forward. Keith doesn’t think he can deal with another image of his or Krolia’s past right now. It’s brief, just a blurry image of him stretched out in the Black Lion’s cargo hold with the wolf, much bigger, lying across Keith’s legs, before Keith is dumped back into the present.

“Guess you’re gonna stick around, huh? You get big though. Any idea how big cosmic wolves are supposed to get?” He chooses not to think about what it means that he was definitely wearing his paladin armor in that vision.

The wolf yips at him and nips his nose, then snuggles down with another huff and closes his eyes.

“Ok,” Keith murmurs. “Bedtime. I can take a hint. It’s been a long day for both of us.”

He’s at least made it up to the wolf. He can deal with all the other shit in the morning.

It’s still dark when he wakes up, but there’s not exactly any kind of day and night cycle. He’s stiff and sore like he’s been sleeping in this one position for a while, but he still feels exhausted. He wants to just go back to sleep, until he realizes that the small furry body in his arms is growling and snaps awake all at once, remembering that he’s in a strange environment with potentially deadly animals.

But then he recognizes the glow of the sigil from his blade (Krolia’s blade?) and sees Krolia herself sitting cross-legged on the ground outside their cave, blade extended across her legs.

“How long have you been there?”

“I followed you,” Krolia says without a hint of remorse. “We don’t know how safe this place is.”

“I can take care of myself,” he snaps.

“I had the knife.” Ah. Well, that’s true. “Can you convince it to stop making that noise?”

“It’s ok,” he soothes, scratching behind the wolf’s ear, and the growling does taper off. “She’s not gonna hurt you.” He glares at Krolia as he says it, daring her to contradict him.

“I still think it’s foolish, but I know we were both awake to see that vision. Clearly I’ve been overruled.”

The wolf grumbles and seems to deliberately turn around so his back is facing Krolia, and Keith hides a smirk in the mane-like fur. At least one good thing has come of this whole ordeal, and it’s that the wolf _definitely_ has a favorite, and that favorite is _definitely_ Keith.

“Can you come out of there so we can talk?”

“No,” Keith says, voice muffled through fur and feeling a bit like a child, but he decides he’s entitled, all things considered. “I’m not moving until you apologize to the wolf.”

“…to the wolf.”

“Yes.”

She heaves a sigh as if this is the most arduous task anyone has ever requested of her. “Dear…wolf. I am sorry that I tried to scare you away from our camp. It was…wrong.”  


It doesn’t sound particularly sincere, but it’s a start, at least. Keith crawls clumsily out of the little cave, limbs stiff from sleeping on cold ground, and the puppy follows behind much more gracefully, stretching and then clamoring right back into Keith’s lap as he sits a few feet away from Krolia. The wolf licks him in the face again, but then turns toward Krolia, tongue still partially out of his mouth; the puppy is effectively _sticking its tongue out at Krolia_ and oh god Keith loves this wolf. He scratches under the wolf’s chin for a few minutes, suspecting Krolia will eventually make the first move if he waits long enough.

“He’s dead?” And wow, Krolia doesn’t beat around the bush, does she?

“Yeah. I was seven years old.”

“Who raised you?”

“No one. I raised myself.” It’s a little unfair to Shiro, but Shiro’s not here and Keith is still angry and he selfishly wants this to hurt Krolia as much as it can. “On Earth, when there are kids that no one wants, they go to orphanages or foster families, where people are supposed to take care of them. But the whole system is broken and most of the time there isn’t a lot of ‘caring’ going on.”

“That isn’t true.” Keith just stares at her in confusion and annoyance. Since when did she know anything about the foster system? “You weren’t unwanted. I wanted you.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“If I’d known –”

“But you didn’t,” Keith cuts her off. “You didn’t know because you weren’t there. You were out on the edges of the universe learning about Galra superweapons or whatever it was that Ranveig had. Knowledge or death, right? Was the knowledge worth it?” Because that’s what has been bothering him the most about this whole thing. He could maybe see Krolia’s actions as protection, if she had been undercover on Zarkon’s command ship, or Sendak’s ship, but Ranveig was a noncontender. He was barely even involved in the war before he died, and the only warlike thing he did was show up at the Kral Zera and die immediately afterward. How was this supposed to help Keith, lightyears away on Earth?

“Kolivan wanted me far away,” Krolia murmurs. “He was afraid that I would go back to Earth for you.”

_You should have_ , Keith thinks bitterly, before the other implication of that sentence rams into him. “Kolivan knew about me?”

“Of course. You should know by now that it’s impossible to keep anything hidden from him.”

“Great. So he just made me go through the Trials for fun, I guess? Or did you ask him to do that? Wanted to make sure I was Galra enough for you, or something?”

“Kolivan subjected you to the Trials?” she asks, and Keith looks over to see her looking a lot angrier than she had before. “You showed up, with my blade, and Kolivan put you through that?”

“Knowledge or death,” Keith says again. He’s pissed at Kolivan, true, for the Trials and never bothering to tell him anything about his mother, but he’s still angrier at Krolia. “I got what I wanted, in the end, even if the Trials sucked. You weren’t there to tell me anything about my heritage, and Dad died before he could explain. I knew _nothing_ about you. Turns out I didn’t know that much about myself, either. That was a fun conversation, having to tell an Altean princess that one of her paladins had been secretly Galra the whole time.” And the rest of the paladins. Shiro, especially. The puppy still in his lap nudges his nose against Keith’s chin, and Keith realizes he’d stopped petting him during that rant. God, he’s going to spoil this wolf; it’s demanding constant scritches already.

“Paladins,” Krolia repeats after a minute or so, and Keith realizes that Kolivan, if he’d told Krolia that Keith was out in space like Keith suspects given how unsurprised she’d been to see him, must have left off a lot of details.

“Yeah. I was the Red Paladin for a while. Black, too, for a little bit, before I joined the Blade full time. The Blue Lion was on Earth, how did you think I got out here anyway?”

“I didn’t know, that you were a Paladin of Voltron,” Krolia says meekly.

“Well, you can just add that to the list of things you don’t know about me,” he snaps. “Good job keeping me safe from the war, by the way. I was real safe, on the frontlines and everything.”

“Keith. I know this is inadequate, but I am sorry.” It at least sounds more sincere than the apology she gave the wolf earlier. “I want to know things about you. I want to learn about you, and not just from the time flashes. If you’ll let me.”

Keith is still angry, but it’s dimmed a bit now. He mostly feels tired and drained, weary from this conversation already. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

Krolia looks like she’s about to argue, but the wolf puppy suddenly sits at attention and growls at her. Just a little, but it’s enough to cut off whatever she was going to say.

_Good boy_.

“Alright,” she says instead. “Will you at least come back to our camp from last night?”

Keith’s not particularly eager to spend another night cramped and cold, so he just nods and tries to lift the pup off his lap to stand up. But the wolf isn’t having any of it, clinging to his suit and whining pitifully during Keith’s attempts to detach him, and he finally just gives up and hoists the pup properly into his arms.

He hears Krolia scoff from behind him as she gets up, as well. “Yes, I can tell it’s going to grow into a very competent hunter,” she mutters sarcastically.

Keith lets that one slide, but the puppy shifts in his arms, front paws and chin resting on Keith’s shoulder, and out of the corner of his eye, Keith can see his tongue sticking out at Krolia again.

Maybe this trip won’t be so bad after all.


End file.
